When important news breaks, journalists often go for quantity. We publish fast, we publish frequently: what happened, to whom, and why. The frenzy of breaking news reporting often gets transferred to readers, resulting in a fragmented, hectic experience.

At regional newspaper Dagblad van het Noorden and other Mediahuis titles, we’ve changed our approach to publishing in these situations. Leveraging the user needs model — in particular the “Help me” need — we’ve been able to offer a better reading experience. This has resulted in calmer readers, clearer journeys and increased subscriptions.

Where it started

On January 16, 2024, a husband and wife were murdered in a small town called Weiteveen. A confession was streamed on Facebook Live, the news spread fast, and our newsroom did what newsrooms do: dispatch, publish, push. Traffic spiked. Yet average attention time diminished and pathways splintered. The signal we got wasn’t “write more”; it was “serve me better.”

Breaking coverage often defaults to a single need: “Give me news/Update me.” Those updates usually spread across multiple short articles and platforms. This results in tab-hopping, context-stitching, and credibility-checking. Our audience arrives to find information, but we too often force them to search. In high-anxiety moments, journalism’s job isn’t just to inform; it’s to reduce cognitive load.

Focus on your audience

Often, user needs are still an afterthought in the journalistic process: a label to put on an article after it has been written. And in high-impact situations, it’s understandable to ignore them entirely.

However, in doing so, the audience perspective is too easily lost. By embracing user needs, especially in those moments, you effectively embrace your readers and their, well, needs.

After we noticed the decline in average attention time, we reframed breaking news from an article stream to a needs-based service. Here’s what we did:

     1. Make “Help me” the backbone. A single, always-on hub that starts with What we know/What we don’t/What we’re doing to find out, updated throughout the day. This becomes the point of entry for new and returning readers.

     2. Let “Give me news” feed the hub. Live updates and quick hits still move fast — but they are added to the hub to prevent any “dead ends.”

     3. Use “Give me insight” to earn depth (and subs). Link the hub to deeper explainers, timelines, reconstructions, Q&As, and accountability pieces. The hub is free; the depth is where we ask for commitment.

This is a functional change: from output (more articles) to orchestration (clear journeys). Editorially, it’s the difference between publishing at people and helping people navigate uncertainty.

After implementing this structure, we saw average attention time return to baseline and a significant increase in subscriptions. Since then, this approach has become our go-to framework in breaking situations. Our central question has changed from: “How can we give our audience as much information as we can?” to a single focus: “How can we guide our audience towards a better understanding of the situation through a clear journey and increased transparency?”

Our takeaway

Treat the user-needs framework not as a taxonomy you retro-tag after publishing, but as the operating system you launch before the first push. In breaking news, the function of journalism isn’t simply to break more things faster; it’s to build a path through the noise. And that path starts with “Help me.”

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